''The Cold Dark Night'' is a 1957

spy Espionage, spying, or intelligence gathering is the act of obtaining secret or confidential information (intelligence) from non-disclosed sources or divulging of the same without the permission of the holder of the information for a tangib ...

thriller novel Thriller is a genre of fiction, having numerous, often overlapping subgenres. Thrillers are characterized and defined by the moods they elicit, giving viewers heightened feelings of suspense, excitement, surprise, anticipation and anxiety. Su ...

by the British writer

Sarah Gainham Rachel Ames, née Stainer (London, 1 October 1915 – Petronell, Austria, 24 November 1999) was a British novelist and journalist who wrote under the pseudonym Sarah Gainham. She is perhaps best known for her 1967 novel ''Night Falls on the City ...

. Her second novel, it is set at the height of the

Cold War The Cold War is a term commonly used to refer to a period of geopolitical tension between the United States and the Soviet Union and their respective allies, the Western Bloc and the Eastern Bloc. The term '' cold war'' is used because the ...

when the 1954

Berlin Conference The Berlin Conference of 1884–1885, also known as the Congo Conference (, ) or West Africa Conference (, ), regulated European colonisation and trade in Africa during the New Imperialism period and coincided with Germany's sudden emergence ...

saw the Big Four foreign ministers arrive in the divided city.Burton p.71 Gainham had worked in Berlin as a journalist at the time of the Conference.

Synopsis

Joe Purdey, an American journalist in Berlin to cover the conference encounters Gisela Schill, an refugee from

East Germany East Germany, officially the German Democratic Republic (GDR; german: Deutsche Demokratische Republik, , DDR, ), was a country that existed from its creation on 7 October 1949 until its dissolution on 3 October 1990. In these years the state ...

whose husband has gone missing while working for British intelligence behind the

Iron Curtain The Iron Curtain was the political boundary dividing Europe into two separate areas from the end of World War II in 1945 until the end of the Cold War in 1991. The term symbolizes the efforts by the Soviet Union (USSR) to block itself and its s ...

. He is drawn into the world of subterfuge and low-level spying taking place in the city. The novel concludes with a face-off between British and Soviet forces at the

Anhalter Bahnhof The Anhalter Bahnhof is a former railway terminus in Berlin, Germany, approximately southeast of Potsdamer Platz. Once one of Berlin's most important railway stations, it was severely damaged in World War II, and finally closed for traffic in 19 ...

, a ruined railway terminus on the border between the two zones.

References

Bibliography

* Burton, Alan. ''Historical Dictionary of British Spy Fiction''. Rowman & Littlefield, 2016. * Reilly, John M. ''Twentieth Century Crime & Mystery Writers''. Springer, 2015. 1957 British novels Novels by Sarah Gainham British thriller novels British spy novels Novels set in Berlin Arthur Barker Limited books {{1950s-thriller-novel-stub